Fitbit Flyer

The Fitbit Flyer is a sleek pair of wireless earphones with a fitness-focused design and powerful sound, but you won't find any special health monitoring or tracking features.

The Fitbit Flyer is a sleek pair of wireless earphones with a fitness-focused design, but you won't find any special health monitoring or tracking features.

Sept. 19, 2017Victoria Song

Fitbit is moving on up. To your ears. A far cry from the wrist-based fitness trackers the company is known for, the $129.95 Fitbit Flyer wireless earphones are chic, simple, sweatproof, and deliver rather good sound quality for a first foray into audio. They face very stiff competition across the board, but a comfortable, secure fit and powerful bass-boosted audio lets the earphones keep up with other, more established names in the field.

A Fitbit for Your Ears

The Flyer earphones are available in two colors: Lunar Gray and Nightfall Blue. Both are attractive, with metallic accents on the earbuds and control box (rose gold for the Lunar Gray and gunmetal for the Nightfall Blue). The cable connecting each earpiece is flat, with an adjustable clip that slides up and down the midpoint of the wire to reduce slack and bouncing when you're active.

There's a three-button control box near the right earpiece, with buttons for adjusting volume, answering calls, and cycling through your playlist. The right earbud holds a small power button that's also used to initiate pairing. It's a somewhat strange location, and slightly inconvenient when you want to quickly turn off the power; most wireless earphones with an inline remote integrate the power and pairing functions into one of the buttons on the remote, rather than putting those controls on an earpiece.

Fitbit includes a protective pouch, a micro USB charging cable, and an array of eartips, wings, and fins so you can customize the fit to your liking. The default fins have a flat, faceted shape that slots into the ridge of your ear; you can swap them out with more secure wings for a tighter fit. After a bit of experimentation, we were able to get a very secure, comfortable fit with no awkward pressure or annoying wiggling.

Focused on Fitness

Contrary to what you might expect from a Fitbit product, the Flyer can't measure your heart rate or track your steps, like the Samsung Gear IconX or Jabra Elite Sport earphones. They just play music, probably because they were designed to be a companion accessory to the Ionic, Fitbit's debut smartwatch. But even without any special tracking, the earphones were clearly designed with fitness in mind.

They have a hydrophobic nanocoating and an IP67 rating, making them sweatproof. You can get them as wet as you want, but you shouldn't wear them (or any non-diving-specific earphones) in the pool, since they don't seal off your ears enough to keep water from getting in and preventing you from hearing your music properly.

You can pair the Flyer with two Bluetooth devices at once—a feature that emphasizes potential use as an Ionic accessory. In essence, this gives you the option of a phone-free workout since you can directly play music from the smartwatch. To be fair, you can pair any Bluetooth earphones with the Ionic, but whether you can keep them connected to the smartwatch and your phone at the same time depends on how well they can handle multiple devices.

Fitbit estimates battery life to be six hours, though the effective battery life will depend on what type of music you play and at what volume. The Flyer doesn't last quite as long as the Jaybird X3, which boasts eight hours of battery life. It should still be more than enough for even the most intense workouts, though, with plenty of additional listening time to spare.

Music Performance

Without any specific fitness features, the Flyer's performance ultimately comes down to sound quality. For Fitbit's first foray into audio, the sound is surprisingly strong and well-balanced. The earphones let you toggle between two sound settings: Signature, for everyday listening, and Power Boost, which amplifies bass for those thumping workout playlists. We've found that Power Boost provides the best results for giving you exciting sound during your workout, even if it makes the overall sound signature a bit less balanced.

The earphones put out some satisfying bass with Power Boost on. They handled our bass test track, The Knife's "Silent Shout," without a hint of distortion even at maximum volumes. The kick drum hits sound pleasantly thumpy despite not producing head-rattling vibrations in Signature mode, but with Power Boost you really get some solid rumbling for an exciting sound.

Yes' "Roundabout" gives a good sense of the sound signature. It's largely balanced, with a slight emphasis on the low-mids and high-mids. The acoustic guitar notes in the track's opening come through clearly, but lack the higher frequency presence to give much more than a hint of the texture of the string plucks. The electric bass sounds punchy in Signature mode, with a nicely rounded presence that lacks very deep resonance. The vocals come through prominently in the mix, but don't overcome the percussion. Power Boost gives the bass much more slappy, funky presence, but it pushes the higher frequencies of the vocals and high hat out of the spotlight.

Industrial music distinctly benefits from Power Boost being turned on. The driving guitar riff in KMFDM's "Ultra" is energetic and prominent in the mix, but the bass drum hits backing it lack much of their power and the overall sound isn't quite as frantic and oppressive as it should in Signature mode. Turn on Power Boost, however, and it becomes a wonderfully sludgy, angry cacophony that properly antagonizes your ears with thumpy thrashing. The vocals lose some of their presence in this mode, but they're still easy to discern in the mix.

Comparisons and Conclusions

Fitbit has made a very good first attempt at fitness-friendly earphones in a market that's already saturated with them. The Flyer's fitness angle doesn't extend beyond a gym-friendly, sweatproof design with heart rate monitoring or workout tracking, and its integration with the Fitbit Ionic smartwatch is little different from any other Bluetooth earphones. However, its sound is powerful and rich, ideal for keeping you motivating whether you're at the gym or on the track.

The Jaybird X3 is an excellent alternative with the same $130 price tag, and the Jam Comfort Buds present a very appealing value with strong bass response for just $50. You can also spend a bit more to go completely wire-free with the Editors' Choice JLab Epic Air. All three alternatives feature gym-friendly, sweatproof designs. Still, the Fitbit Flyer earphones are worthy of your consideration even without any tracking or monitoring tricks their pedigree implies.

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Victoria Song is an analyst on the Hardware team at PCMag. Since graduating from Temple University’s Japan Campus in 2010, she's been found reporting and editing in every corner of the newsroom at The ACCJ Journal, The Japan News, and New York bureau of The Yomiuri Shimbun. In her spare time, she bankrupts herself going to theater, buying expansions to board games, and cleaning out the stacks at The Strand. Someday, she hopes Liverpool FC will win the league, but she isn’t holding her breath.